Posts Tagged ‘Matt Higby’

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Planetside 2 is two years old today and still going strong. It’s a Planniversary, if you will.

Ahem. I’ve written a bunch about my time with the game, including this. Yes, I like it a lot. One person who has been at the forefront of that long campaign of making me like something for two whole years, and who was also implicated in the complex saga of development beforehand, is Matt Higby. He’s headed up the SOE team throughout the twenty-four months of the game being live, and still seems to have plenty of energy for the future of this peerless F2P shooter. With those two years in mind, I had a chat with him.

Read on below for a myriad of thoughts on the game that does a war of red, blue, and purple like no other.

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I keep forgetting that Planetside 2 is in closed beta. It’s so big and busy that my brain tricks me into believing it’s been launched. But there’s still a lot to do, and SOE have shared the more immediate fixes with the players. SOE President John “Smed” Smedley took to the forums to outlay a bunch of upcoming changes, including some dramatic changes to the in-game economy, the announcement of another continent, and he even teased when the release date would be announced.

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We recently caught up with Matt Higby, Creative Director of Planetside 2. Read on for what he had to say about various aspects of the game world, the factions, and the game mechanics, including vehicle customisation, and Higby’s penchant for griefing.

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Speaking to SOE Creative Director Matt Higby, we have learned that Planetside 2 will be PC-only, and that it will be a straight remake of the original game with modern technology. There will be no instancing, and Higby says: “we’re only limited by how many can physically fit into a small area.” The territory capture is now far more detailed, featuring more than just towers and bases: “All of our maps are completely hand-crafted so that every square inch supports gameplay. The size of our environments is completely unrivalled.” Combat is now powered by a generative mission system, filling in some of the biggest holes in the original game.

Skills too have radically changed: “It uses an offline time-based learning method – if you’re familiar with Eve Online, how they unlock skills, it’s similar to that.” No word on pricing or release date yet, but I am so excited I might burst. Go read the full preview.